Hello Martin

They even knew it back in the old days:

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch”

Rudyard Kipling, If - 1895

Nope, not another “analysis” of the deal really, but some quick thoughts:

- M&A Would take a big dip for next 2-3 years.
Had dinner with Michael Montgomery yesterday, first thing he pointed out was that MS and Yahoo are 2 of the most common bidders for web companies, i know Yahoo is pretty much ALWAYS in the mix for web companies, so would be quite a blow. Time to get back on horse would be a while, considering integration would be 12 months or more, then another 12 months to find out where things have gone wrong and how they can patch it together by buying someone to fill the gap. IHT have a story on it today to.

- Search monetization wouldn’t increase hugely.

Why? Google receives a very large part of their search revenue from non US operations, both MSN and Yahoo are not market leaders in any region (well except Japan in Yahoo’s case) - And Yahoo’s Contextual program is still only available for US based companies/people.

- People are stuck with Google
Maybe i’m very much biased here because i know the back end technology a lot better, and understand how to structure a query to get the result i want. But i think people who use google currently will be stuck with it, and even though it’s a much simpler switch than say from Windows to Mac Os, i still think it will be hard to win over current users.

- News Corp and PE firms make an offer, would be very interesting.

Why, well according to a US piece by a analyst, Yahoo sits on a lot of, off balance sheet assets, if News Corp could get someone to pick these up, so strip company of all “non media/ad assets” they could probably get in the range of something doable combined with some PE money, another issue though would be whom to run that unit, my suggestion is Omid Kordestani, but i guess it would be hard to tear him away from Google and his 3$ billion or so, very nice guy and seems incredibly smart.

Yahoo’s Off-Balance Sheet Assets:

Jeff Lindsay’s Yahoo valuation, as relayed by Eric Savitz at Barrons:

He calculates the total value of the company’s non-operating assets at $13.24 a share: $6.48 a share for the Yahoo! Japan stake, $3.13 for its share of Alibaba.com, $1.07 for its Alibaba Group stake, 8 cents for its share of GMarket (GMKT), $1.99 a share in cash, and 49 cents a share in net operating loss carryforwards. That leaves the value of core Yahoo as of last night’s close at just $10.85.”

- Yahoo used to own quite a bit of google shares, 8.2 Million to be exact

Yahoo settled a patent dispute with Google back in 2004, regarding serving contextual ad’s depending on a search query. They got another 2.7 Million shares for that, today that looks quite little. But if Yahoo had held on to those shares, at closing time they would have been worth a bit more than $4.2 Billion, which would have been more than 10% of Yahoo’s Market Cap.

- Yahoo/MS would be world leading on IM and E-mail
Just to bad you don’t make any money off that…
But would be interesting if News Corp bought Yahoo, and then bought Skype…

This article made me really happy

Nytimes - Mosquito Nets and a New Drug Make Sharp Inroads Against Malaria

Dr. Arata Kochi, chief of malaria for the W.H.O. “If this is done everywhere, we can reduce the disease burden 80 to 85 percent in most African countries within five years.”

About 1-3 million people die yearly due to Malaria, most of whom are children, and even though this is not a huge step forward from a medical point of view, it’s still a huge win!